"Zombie flick"? Are you kidding me?... (possible spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (8 July 2003)

If ignorance is bliss, than the IMDB comment board must be the paradise. And today I found another proof for it: the fact that half of all the people that commented on the "28 days later" here were actually discussing things like (sweet jesus!) differences between "real zombies" and the infected guys in the movie, for god's sake!
People! What the heck is wrong with you? Wake up! What is it with Americans always trying to put everything in some kind of a supid framework and then bashing everything that doesn't fit? Aren't we supposed to be unbiased and unprejudiced? You've been told that this is a zombie flick. It is not. Big deal! This is not what the movie is about... And this is not what you should be thinking after watching it...
Now the movie itself. Simply put, excellent. Just what I've expected. Sca ry enough to make me jump a couple of times (and it takes a lot to scare a person like me), and smart enough to make me think about some things I don't normally think about after watching a sci-fi movie. First, the whole "kill an infected in a heartbeat" thing. You don't normally see that in movies like this one. Usually the character manages to say a long sad tirade, shed a tear, and apologize a thousand times before killing the good-guy-gone-bad person. Here, it's a bit more brutal and realistic. You get bitten - you're going away. Then, the deserted London sequence. Brilliant. The similar sequences in Vanilla Sky and Devil's Advocate are nothing comparing to this one. This is probably the scariest part of the movie. Hollywood horror flicks directors should learn from Danny Boyle. Silence and absence of monsters (filmed properly, of course) work much, much better than "creepy" music and presence of one. Also, one of the best scenes in the movie is the "dialogue" between Jim and a "disloyal" soldier while they're waiting to be executed. The camerawork is excellent (just as it is throughout the movie... i'm not describing it here, so just go see it), and there is some kind of a message (something you rarely see in modern movies). The saddest part is, a lot of what the soldier characters in the movie say is ultimately true. There is nothing abnormal about people killing people just for the sake of killing, for it is happenning all the time. In this case, they just speeded up the whole dying process a bit...
Also, the last 20-30 minutes of the movie is not Hollywood at all (although the actual endling is a bit cheesy): what you see is not Save-Two-Girls-You-Barely-Know-Hero-Wannabe Jim. It's more like I-Wanna-Save-My-Own-Butt Jim. Just think about it: the soldier who is to be executed with him tells him England's quarantinned and the rest of the world is doing just fine. Then, after he escapes, he sees the airliner in the sky. And THEN he goes back and tries to rescue the other people... You figure it out.
Anyhow, this movie is definitely worth seeing. In my personal opinion, it could've been a bit deeper (I'm a big fan of philosophical movies, and I have a certain prejudice towards thrillers). 9.5/10 . See this instead of T3 (which was a piece of junk).